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Stereotypes about “the old person” perhaps misrepresent reality most enormously with respect to personality. Attitudinal studies such as those cited earlier have found that elderly people as a class are regarded as rigid, past-oriented, judgmental, asexual, and so forth. These stereotypes are not supported by direct studies of personality in the later adult years.
What we find instead is a great diversity of personality types or lifestyles (e.g., Costa & McRae, 1984; Kogan, 1990). Although gerontologists disagree with respect to specific approaches to personality (e.g., trait vs. contextual models), there is fairly strong consensus regarding the fact of diversity. It is commonly noted that people become more rather than less individualized as they move through years of unique experiences.
There is no need here to survey the many competing models of personality that continue to contend for the support of clinicians, educators, and researchers.
Partisans of a particular theory or classification system can determine for themselves how well their favored approach works when applied to elderly adults. One does not have to abandon all that one has previously learned and invent entirely new models.
For example, trait theorists who have focused on extraversion-introversion in young adult populations might well be proficient in identifying differential sources of anxiety and differential coping strategies in elderly adults based on this salient dimensions.
Similarly, clinicians who draw upon the psychoanalytic tradition will find many clues to understanding problems experienced in the later adult years.
For example, a fashion buyer for a major department store was so valued for her skills that the organization asked her to continue to work past the usual retirement age.
Some of her colleagues protested vigorously against keeping her on, however, pointing out that she was a constant source of tension and conflicts in her relationships with them. In this instance, a psychoanalytically-oriented counselor helped the elderly woman reconstruct a long-term pattern of developing masochistic and competitive relationships, the only type of relationships she could trust. (The “oppositional dualism” dynamics of this type of case are described by Panken, 1973, especially pp.139 ff.)
The point here is not to endorse any particular personality theory, but simply to note that in approaching the anxiety disorders experienced by elderly adults, one can glean insights and leads from a variety of theories. It is probable that theories with a strong developmental component will be more useful.
Although trait theories often are favored by mainstream personality researchers and provide convenient ways to describe and classify, we are likely to find more substantive value in theories that emphasize time, change, and context. As always, however, the skill of the particular clinician, researcher, or educator is a major variable in determining a theory’s usefulness.
A central controversy in the study of personality across the adult years could have significant bearing on anxiety. This is the question of continuity vs. change.
There is now fairly broad agreement that the personality patterns established earlier in life remain salient throughout the adult years, although
modified to some extent through by experience and changed circumstances.
And, as already noted, there is also agreement that a variety of personality types can be observed in the later adult years both because diversity is evident from the start and because people tend to become even more individuated through their distinctive life experiences.
The question at issue is whether or not there is a transformation process that operates across the
observed diversity and continuity. Is there something about “aging” that introduces systematic change within all the enduring personality types?
One possibility here may have particular relevance for understanding anxiety in the later adult years: the Jungian-flavored, cross-culturallyresearched theory proposed by David Guttmann (1987; 1993). He suggests that there is a systematic change in mastery styles from youth through old age.
This theory will be considered in a little more detail later in this chapter.
What is important for the moment is the recognition that the personality characteristics of elderly people might be more complicated than previously supposed: a variety of lifestyles, each enduring with some modifications within its own frame of organization, but all perhaps being subjected to a general process of change.
